December 07, 2006

"Mel Martinez is Spanish for Harriet Miers"

Andrew Leonard at Salon
reports that the linguistic nationalists at English First are in an uproar
over President Bush's selection of Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) to take over the
chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. The group disagrees
with Martinez's position on immigration reform, but what really gets
their goat is his stance on language issues. "Mel Martinez is Spanish for Harriet Miers," they mockingly proclaim on their new
website "Stop
Martinez." They go on to assert that the Cuban-born senator is "wrong on English" because he didn't vote for the Inhofe
amendment last May declaring English the national language of the
United States. (He didn't vote against it; he just didn't vote. They
neglect to say whether he abstained or had some other reason for
missing the vote.)

Worse than that, Martinez had the gall to speak in Spanish on the
Senate
floor. The relevant bullet point on "Stop Martinez" reads:

I was shocked to discover that the hyperlink ostensibly explaining the "doubts about the translation" takes you to a Language Log post, specifically Mark
Liberman's entry of Feb. 6, 2005, "Never
pronouncing East Thursday?" In the post, Mark discusses what
appears to be a computer-generated Spanish-to-English translation of a story about Martinez's speech that showed up on the website for the Mexican newspaper El
Sol de Zacatecas. Yes, Mark expressed doubts about that particular
translation (since it had glaring errors like translating este jueves as "east Thursday").
But why in the world would the English Firsters commandeer a post about
faulty MT as some sort of implicit critique of Martinez and his speech?
("Doubts about the translation" makes it sound like there was something
sinister going on in the Spanish text that was omitted from the
Senate's official English rendering.) Did they not actually read the
post, or did they figure criticizing a translation of the
speech — or rather a translation of an article about the speech — was tantamount to criticizing Martinez himself? Either way, I
think I speak on behalf of the entire Language Log family when I say:
leave us the heck out of it.

[Update, 12/8/06: Jim Boulet, executive director of English First and maintainer of the "Stop Martinez" site, responds here.]